AuRoom
Unlock Cash Keep Your Gold
About
The problem it solves ### The Problem AuRoom Solves In emerging markets like Indonesia, **gold is widely used as a store of value**, not as a liquid asset. People save in gold to protect against inflation and currency depreciation, but when urgent cash needs arise—such as medical expenses, education fees, or small business capital—the only practical option today is **to sell the gold**. This creates three fundamental problems: 1. **Forced Loss of Long-Term Value** Selling gold breaks long-term savings discipline and removes exposure to an asset meant to hedge inflation. Users often regret selling when gold prices rise afterward. 2. **Inefficient and Costly Liquidity Access** Traditional solutions like pawnshops or gold-backed loans are custodial, opaque, and expensive, with high interest rates and limited transparency. 3. **Lack of Onchain Utility for Real-World Assets** Existing DeFi protocols focus heavily on crypto-native assets. Real-world assets like gold are underutilized onchain, despite strong real demand and cultural relevance. AuRoom addresses this gap by enabling users to **unlock fiat liquidity without selling their gold**, transforming gold from a passive store of value into a productive, non-custodial financial asset.
How it's made
Challenges we ran into ### Challenges We Ran Into Building AuRoom required navigating both onchain constraints and real-world financial integration. The main challenges we encountered were: - **Integration with IDRX (Fiat-Denominated Stablecoin)** Unlike crypto-native assets, IDRX represents off-chain fiat value. This required careful handling of minting, burning, decimals, and accounting to ensure that onchain debt accurately maps to real-world fiat exposure without breaking DeFi assumptions. - **Off-Chain Withdrawal & Redemption of IDRX** Enabling users to ultimately redeem IDRX into real fiat introduces an off-chain dependency layer. This creates challenges around user experience, trust boundaries, and compliance, since the onchain protocol must remain non-custodial while relying on external fiat on/off-ramp infrastructure. - **Maintaining DeFi Simplicity While Being RWA-Compatible** Most DeFi lending designs assume purely onchain assets. Designing a system that works with real-world assets like gold and fiat—without over-engineering or adding excessive custodial risk—required strict separation between onchain logic and off-chain processes. - **Balancing Safety and Accessibility for Early Users** For an MVP, parameters like LTV, liquidation thresholds, and minimum borrow sizes had to be conservative enough to be safe, yet simple and intuitive for non-crypto-native users. These challenges shaped AuRoom’s architecture: keeping the core protocol fully onchain and deterministic, while treating fiat redemption and compliance as modular, off-chain extensions.